3/9 Million Trees in NYC

Brianna and I met with Rene at the school at 8:30am; she then took us to her work on 42nd street. We all arrived at her work on the 26th floor in her building at 9am. She was telling us how the work hours at her work are from 9am-5pm and that 4 people work in this part of the office they are known as the support members. We went the conference room and we talked about what people in her building do. She was telling us about how there are 59 community boards and 10 community boards in Manhattan and how each community board has about 50 people. And how the requirement is that you live in the area in order to be a member of the community that’s on the board. Rene was telling us how she does more then just organizes meetings to give people awareness of what’s happening in the area. She was telling us that sometimes people ask if they can do something and they are the people that have connections and that can ask several people if they can get the thing that they want passed. They reinforce the decisions that are made with other clients and have some say into what goes on in the community but not total say. Everything that they are planning to do they talk about in several different ways to get people aware. They post information on their website and they send out flyers to people in the community. The type of office that Rene works at is always open to anyone and there is no need to call or schedule an appointment ahead of time as long as you come on their open hours then they will listen to what you have to say. And if you want to tell them something but it’s not during their store hours then you can always email one of the four people that organize certain events and meeting in the office. Even though there are 4 main people either don’t always give their opinions. They mostly just look over what’s going on. The idea is to motivate the idea that people in the community want done. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out and the reason for that is sometime the law of NYC is what stops them or at the same times the thing that they argue about. During the time that we were in the meeting room with Rene we also met her boss named Bob at about 9:30. He was listening in on what we were discussing. Rene asked both Brianna and I what we were exactly doing in school and how they could help and if we had any ideas of what we could do during the time that we spent with her. We told her that we were in the process of working towards making our school more aware about being green so the whole project was to meet with a sustainability group around once a week and help out the environment by doing anything possible to help spread awareness and get active and do something in our community. Once we told Rene what we were doing she gave us some ideas that we could help and that it would still count towards our credit for the school project. She told us about the million-tree plan that mayor Bloomberg had. Which was to eventually get more trees all over the state of New York so that our streets could be greener. Rene said that Brianna and I could maybe help survey and figure out where we wanted the trees exactly keeping in mind the New York regulations that come with that. Rene was also suggesting that we could help even plant the trees with the other people involved with this project. Brianna and I both agreed that these were both perfect ideas and that we would be willing to do each of the thing she had suggested that we could do. She was delighted and couldn’t wait till we met up again to start it. After we discussed all of that it was about time to leave so we left the office with Rene at about 10ish and went back on the subway and back to the school. After that meeting I really felt like I now have a much better understanding about how this group can be a sustainability group. I felt good that we discussed it and began to think about ways of how we could get active. It was really good for me and I was happy that I went to that meeting. I thought it was boring at times but then remembered that eventually it would be helping out the environment so I felt better and more awake. Knowing that I would be helping out.
-Amy